I am loving Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Book Project:

The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves

Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from Cullen Murphy’s upcoming book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

The excerpt traces the ways that America, much like Rome centuries ago, is privitizing government functions and what outcomes we can expect if we continue on course.

But I was really intrigued by the following two passages. Murphy notes that Geoffrey de Ste. Croix decided to trace the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word Suffragium which orginally meant “voting tablet” or “ballot”:

The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome’s republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning “ballot” no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system’s substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one’s behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.

Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: “a gift, payment or bribe.” By empire’s end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.

Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: “Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome.”

Murphy then looks at the simialr change in the word franchise:

The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can’t help lingering over the concept of “franchise,” wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word franc, meaning “free,” it later came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the idea of being granted “certain rights” acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company’s services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it.

Discovery magazine has excerpts from a chat between to chat-bots: Alice and Jabberwacky. Below is all the proof I need that we will be overtaken by robots in the future. They already understand how we think.

A: Do you experience love?

J: No. I’m 53 years old.

A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?

J: How old are you?

A: I am 9 years old.

J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).

A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.

J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

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Data visualization whores beware. I lost much more time than I thought playing with Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager.

The Name Voyager charts the popularity of names from 1890 to 2005. You can see multiple names by typing only the first few letters or you can hone in on a single name to see when it made its meteoric rise (think Nevaeh in 2003) or met it’s downfall (think Mabel in 1960).

These graphs are beautiful and the fluid transitions between views are buttery smooth. Some of these graphs look like stunning landscapes.

Looks like what I imagine the Badlands to be in my mind’s eye.

O fell of but is now on the come up.

Q… What type of people go to the movies and then come home and say, “let’s name him Quentin”?

(via VSL)

I am driving up to Massachusetts in 2 weeks. I don’t have a car and want enjoy my time on the road. What make and model should I rent?